MANILA – The country continues to face employment woes due to the oversupply of graduates and undersupply of skills nationwide, a labor official told a Senate hearing on Wednesday.
Carmela Torres, undersecretary of DOLE’s Employment and Human Resource Development Cluster, explained that oversupply can be measured by looking at the country’s graduates in higher education.
“…and there is definitely an oversupply because there is a prevailing job mismatch. Our graduates do not match those needed by enterprises,” Torres pointed out during the hearing of the Senate committee on labor, employment and human resources development.
But while there is an “oversupply” of graduates, Torres stressed that there is an undersupply of Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) skills across the country.
“We also have an undersupply of TVET skills because we cannot employ the right people for jobs. The country’s quality of workforce is low,” Torres added.
Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, who presided over the hearing as the chairman of the committee, stressed that there is a pressing need to implement “focused” and “intensive” measures to improve the employability of Filipinos, especially the youth.
The panel discussed several measures that seek to reform and strengthen the country’s national apprenticeship program embodied in the Labor Code of the Philippines.
“Our industries need a lot of knowledge and skills that our young people don’t fully learn in school. As a result, the school-to-work transition of Filipino youth is slow,” said Estrada in his opening statement.
“An important intervention to address this perennial predicament is through apprenticeship which provides practical training on the job, founded on relevant theoretical instruction. It seeks to provide the economy with trained workers by addressing the job-skills mismatch and in turn, improving the employability of our people,” he added.
DOLE attributed apprenticeship with “high level technical skills,” saying that it is different from an On-the-Job Training (OJT) as the latter can be “short term.” (Charie Abarca © Philippine Daily Inquirer)
